Eat This Book

From Eugene Peterson's new masterpiece, _Eat This Book_, p. 11:
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Reading is an immense gift, but only if the words are assimilated, taken into the soul - eaten, chewed, gnawed, received in unhurried delight. Words of men and women long dead, or separated by miles and/or years, come off the page and enter our lives freshly and precisely, conveying truth and beauty and goodness, words that God's Spirit has used and uses to breathe life into our souls. Our access to reality deepens into past centuries, spreads across continents. But this reading also carries with it subtle dangers. Passionate words of men and women spoken in ecstasy can end up flattened on the page and dissected with an impersonal eye. Wild words wrung out of excruciating suffering can be skinned and stuffed, mounted and labeled as museum specimens.
*****

Even this magnificent morsel does not do justice to what I'm finding here. Run - don't walk - to Amazon.com and order it. Let Peterson take you by the hand and walk you gingerly into God's world, the world that inhabits the holy Scriptures, the scrolls that John, Ezekiel and Jeremiah ate so long ago.

qb